A longitudinal cutting apparatus for paper, plastic foils, or aluminum foils normally has several pairs of disk blades, the blade pairs slitting the workpiece web longitudinally into individual strips. Such a longitudinal cutting apparatus is part of a winding machine that produces individual narrow rolls from a wide material web. In order to produce different roll formats, the disk-blade pairs are positionable transversely of the web-travel direction.
Such a longitudinal cutting apparatus is known from WO 1999/047317. The there described longitudinal cutting apparatus is comprised of a driven upper blade and a freely rotatable lower blade. The upper blade is a disk blade and the lower blade is a cup blade. Each pair of blades is positionable transversely of the travel direction of the web to be slit to produce the desired format width. In addition each upper blade is positionable along its rotation axis toward the respective lower blade so that the two blade edges can be exactly aligned to each other. Furthermore each upper blade can be raised to an inactive position if it is not needed for longitudinal slitting.
The rotary drive for the upper blade is an electric motor, in particular a compact brushless direct-current motor. The motor is mounted above the upper blade and drives the upper blade via a belt. The provision of the drive motor above the disk blade makes it possible to make the longitudinal cutting apparatus narrower.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,974,727 describes a cutting apparatus with rotatably driven blades for fashion cutting of cardboard sheets. The cutter of the cutting apparatus is comprised of two separately driven disk blades that are driven by a drive and a shaft extending over the entire width of the machine. For setting the cutting positions of the cutting apparatus the slides are shiftable transversely of the drive shaft. To set the cutting depth the disk blades are pivotal about the axis of the driving gear, to which end the gears of the drive are in constant mesh.